


Attempted Escape 0

by MegumitheGreat



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Attempted Escape, Human Experimentation, Jenova Project (Compilation of FFVII), M/M, Nibelheim (Compilation of FFVII), Post-Nibelheim Incident (Compilation of FFVII), Psychological Trauma, Self-Indulgent, Separation Anxiety
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:14:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25649365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MegumitheGreat/pseuds/MegumitheGreat
Summary: Attempting to escape has its repercussions.
Relationships: Zack Fair & Cloud Strife
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	Attempted Escape 0

**Author's Note:**

> I remembered the flashback in Nibelheim after Cloud rejoins the party and regains his true memories. The mako pods in the basement lab have the fingernail etchings of Cloud and Zack trying to escape not long after the experiments began...but it surely couldn't have been that easy and without some sort of effect on Cloud.
> 
> I like writing about the experiments WAY too much. Four years worth of heinous actions!

After the initial grafting of the Jenova cells into their bodies, Cloud and Zack were placed into the large mako-filled pods. Since then, they were repeatedly pulled out for feedings and baths and additional tests and put back in to steep. There were times that they were separated from each other, which hadn’t bothered Zack as much as it had bothered Cloud. Specimen Z, as he was called, had the mental fortitude to withstand the worst of the treatments and even attempted to resist them. Specimen C, however, was the opposite, suffering not only from the trauma he suffered in his skirmish with Sephiroth but from severe general anxiety brought on by the endless darkness of the basement. The research aides compared their charts between them periodically. The times when they were together even in those glowing-green pods, Cloud was calmer. During bath time when they were apart for thirty minutes max, they noticed that his heart rate sharply increased.

“Hmm, if they want to be together so much, then we might as well conduct another experiment. See if they can actually mate and produce offspring,” Hojo nonchalantly said one day. “Throw them in a small room and let them rut.”

“B-But, Dr. Hojo, even if they were to…mate…they’re still males,” one of the research aides said.

“So then just let them go at it and record it for research or something—I’ve got more important things to see about than babysitting two overgrown children. Results shouldn’t be taking this long to show. Actually, I have a different idea.”

Hojo was never around to watch them except for one day a week. On that day, he kept them apart for hours and hours, studying the reaction that Cloud had. He had notes around his lab in the basement that Jenova cells strived to come back together. He wondered if that was happening to Cloud whenever he was separated from Zack. He would lock Cloud up in a closet in one of the second-floor bedrooms while Zack was left suspended in his pod, where he was forced to listen to the muffled screams begging to let him out from way up in the manor.

“Zack…! Zack, please! Come back! Don’t do this to me! I can’t take it!” Cloud sobbed before he started to feel dizzy from the stress. He lowered himself to the floor to stabilize himself. “Z-Zack…Zack…help…we need to get out…I want to go home…”

The research aide that was minding Zack carefully took him out of the pod for food. He made sure that Zack had restraints on; it wasn’t the first time he had gotten violent while Cloud was locked up in solitary, and he had only gotten more protective of him with every waking second.

“Why are you doing this to him?” Zack demanded to know.

“Testing,” the aide said.

“By torturing him like this?!” He was made to sit at a small metal folding table for his food. “Let me see him. He can’t be alone…not since what happened—you know what happened!” He clenched his teeth in frustration. “Do you want me to beg? Let me be with him.”

The aide was unsure to listen to his request, but since Hojo was preoccupied with other matters, he didn’t see the harm in letting him up there. He kept the restraints on and led him up by a rope. And as he climbed the stairs behind the aide to the second floor, he heard the pitiful whimpering of an ailing young man. The aide ordered Zack to sit on the bed before turning to the side. With Zack in his peripheral vision, he unlocked the closet that Cloud had been kept in.

“Cloud!” Zack cried out upon seeing him. He shot up from the bed and tumbled down to beside him. His hands still tied behind his back, he nudged him with nose as best as he could. The mako-soaked clothes smelled awful, and there was a hint of urine. “Speak to me. I’m here now.”

Cloud moaned and groaned from the exhaustion of his anxiety and from the fumes from the mako. “Zack…you’re here…” he said with a trembling voice. “You’re here…you’re here…!” He pushed himself up with some difficulty then attempted to hug him. Before he could fully embrace him, Cloud’s consciousness waned again. “I don’t…feel good…”

“It’s the mako—you need to give him a bath!” Zack ordered the aide. Bending over him as if to protect him from any harm, he glared at the aide. “Or at least let me give him a bath. He shouldn’t be forced to sit in his own waste.”

“You know cleaning duty is left to us,” the aide retorted.

“Take a break today; I’ll do it—after all, you owe me this. I’m a precious test subject, right?” Zack turned down back to Cloud. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you, okay? I won’t abandon you, and I certainly won’t let them do anything to you.”

“I’m so tired,” Cloud mumbled. “So tired…”

“I know you are, but you need to get cleaned up.” Zack glared at the aide again, this time holding eye contact until the aide finally bent to his will. After making Zack promise not to attempt to escape, he took off the restraints. Zack picked up Cloud in his arms. “Almost there.”

“Don’t leave me,” the traumatized blond said shakily.

“I won’t.”

\------------------------------------

Cloud and Zack had been placed back in their pods filled with mako. While Zack had washed his partner, the aide had taken advantage of their preoccupation to drug their food with a strong sedative to keep them subdued. When Zack had fed Cloud before eating his own, he didn’t know that it had been laced already. By the time he had noticed how distant the younger of the two had become, he realized something was wrong.

“What did you do…?” Zack asked him. He had trouble keeping his head up, much less threaten the aide to fix them. “C-Cloud…is already…”

“You’re going to sleep for a few days,” the aide told him.

And they were back in the pods, soaking in mako with S cells growing and multiplying inside of them. Cloud woke up first in the greenish liquid. He was still sluggish, the mako stinging his eyes as he tried to remember where he was.

“Za…ack…” he gurgled. He realized that this time his clothes had been removed, probably for washing after he urinated himself. “Za…ck…wake…up…”

“Cloud…?” Zack mumbled. Of course, in the mako, they couldn’t hear each other.

With his fingernail, Cloud wrote a small message: _Let’s get out of here._

Zack, halfway between unconscious and panicking from the sudden realization they were still trapped, wrote back: _Feeding time…That’s our chance…_

Hojo returned to their pods, taking note that they were conscious again. He had been followed by the aide that had drugged them and had been taking care of them and another one. They couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he had a scowl on his face. He raised a tiny gun on the aide that had been there with them. Cloud saw it happen—the flash of the shot and the crumbling body before his pod. It hit him. Hojo could easily dispose of them just like he could with his own men.

The replacement that had casually watched him murder a man in cold blood came to Cloud’s pod and emptied it. He was no longer suspended in fluid, trapped in that glass pod, and vulnerable to whatever Hojo had planned.

“What’s this?” the mad scientist asked as he examined Cloud’s note to Zack. “You were trying to plan an escape?”

Cloud slowly shook his head. He was frightened by the man before him, and when he opened the pod to pull him to the operating table against his will, he learned what the fear of humans was—different from the fear and rage he had felt towards Sephiroth; this was one for true monsters. Hojo beckoned his aide to restrain him and stuff his mouth with a cloth to muffle his screams. The cells had been grafted into his left arm but only a little bit. Anxiety constricting his chest, he felt needle after needle and scalpel after scalpel implant more and more of the cells.

**Author's Note:**

> In a way, this could be a prequel to Awakening? Idk, anything can be written on their four years in captivity! I also couldn't think of a good ending, but I think where it ends could work for if I wanted to write more.


End file.
